RALEIGH - New N.C. State football coach Tom O'Brien met with the news media on Friday to discuss the Wolfpack's football situation entering the final few weeks before the start of preseason drills.

It wasn't long before the question-and-answer session turned into a discussion about what the coach did on his summer vacation. In a word, it was moving.

Along with seven of his classmates from their days at the Naval Academy, O'Brien took a week off in May to attend a guys-only golf trip in Portugal. It was the group's third such outing, following trips to Ireland in 2003 and 2005. But the vacation wasn't so much about playing golf as male bonding in the memory of another Midshipman -- Charles "Chic" Burlingame III.

Burlingame, then 51, was a pilot on the Sept. 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. after being hijacked.

O'Brien, who was 52 at the time of the terrorist attacks, said he didn't really know Burlingame. But the nature of the Naval Academy is such that all Middies are linked one to another. At a reunion the following weekend, O'Brien and some of his friends decided that life is too short for good friends to become disconnected by professional obligations, be they Xs and Os or corporate board meetings. They vowed to get together for something special every other year thereafter.

"Golf was just the excuse to do it," said O'Brien, a 17-handicapper. "I don't remember what I shot, and it doesn't matter."

The trip did matter. O'Brien said he told Wolfpack athletics director Lee Fowler during contract negotiations last winter that there could be only one dealbreaker -- that he wouldn't be allowed to join his old buddies on the spring getaway.

None of this has much to do with O'Brien's coaching ability, but it does say something about who he is away from a football field. In his 10 seasons as head coach at Boston College and 15 years as an assistant at Virginia, O'Brien's reputation as a cold, calculating tactician was firmly established. There's so much George Welsh in O'Brien that it's eerie.

But Welsh, on his most sentimental day, wouldn't talk about anything more personal than the inner workings of a nuclear submarine. He certainly wouldn't go on a golf trip to Europe, even if it were in the memory Francis Scott Key.

What O'Brien said about his trip on Friday inspired me to attempt to learn more about the Middie whose memory inspired these biannual trips.

The Washington Post, in a story after the crash, reported that Burlingame, even as a boy of 6, had dreamed of flying airplanes and eventually piloted F-4 Phantoms in the Navy.

The crash killed 125 people, including the 59 on American Flight 77. At the time, Burlingame was living in Fairfax County, Va., and his family quickly started a non-profit scholarship foundation to provide college money for youngsters interested in military careers.

Until Friday, I did not know the name Charles "Chic" Burlingame, and I'm something of a history buff. But it's a name worth remembering.

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